Inception is a fun thriller movie involving dreams.  And dreams within dream.  And dreams within dreams within dream.  You get the point

For the Minimalist movie poster assignment, it took me a while to think of a movie that could be summed up minimally.  Eventually I decided on Inception because The Noun Project had a nice picture of dreaming I could use.  It’s a movie I like a lot, and it didn’t take long to think of how I could use the dreaming picture to sum it up.  To make the poster I uploaded the photo into Gimp twice, made one really small, and moved it into the bigger cloud bubble.  I filled the bigger one with white first since it started as black.  I added the text and filled the background and that was that.

A minimalist poster for television?  Why not?  Hey, I remember when there were new episodes of MacGyver airing (that means broadcast).  I chose something both old and new.

+1 for anyone who understands how the title of this post relates to the poster.

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Wow, a minimalist poster? sounds like my kind of assignment. Lots of thinking, little tedium.

When it comes to deciding what movie I wanted to do a minimalist poster on, I only had a few options. The example posters all had readily identifiable nouns in their designs, and I know of very few movies with such recognizable things. Ultimately, I decided on one of the Lord of the Rings movies, since they are iconic enough to be recognized. As for which one, I figured the first one would be the best, since a poster from the second or third movie would have to be readily differentiable from the preceding movies. At first, I wanted to try an overlayed sword, axe, and bow as a symbol of the fellowship. Ultimately however, my own drawing skills were not satisfactory, and online images looked to intricate for a minimalist poster. Ultimately, I decided upon this design.

To put this together, I utilized my favorite graphics editors, MS Paint and MS Powerpoint. Minamalist posters heavily rely on geometric themes, so the built in tools of these packages were sufficient, as are the color pallets, since the posters contain no gradient shading or other complications. The eye was made by intersecting two ovals in an attempt to get the pointed ends so often associated with evil eyes. The Circle is supposed to be reminiscent of the Ring of Power, but in hindsight I probably should have worked to give it a thicker band. The red background is there simply because no other color would work for the foreground I had in mind.

Ah, October! The month of Halloween, and the season for spooks and nostalgia. And what better way to celebrate this month of skeletons and ghosts than by watching Over the Garden Wall every day until November?

Over the Garden Wall is a 10-part miniseries that aired on Cartoon Network in November of 2014. The story follows that of stepbrothers Wirt and Greg as they travel through the woods to find their way home. Of course, it’s not that simple, and every 10-minute episode, they run into some sort of danger.

I absolutely love this series. It’s about the length of a feature-film altogether, which makes it easy to watch whenever you feel like it, and the stylistic animation and slightly unsettling nature is just perfect. I fully recommend watching it; my explanation isn’t giving it the full justice it deserves, but it’s all I can say about it without giving it away! You can watch it online (I believe on the Cartoon Network website, or it could be….floating around somewhere).

Anyway, this series seemed perfect for creating a Minimalist TV Poster, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Process:
Simply using the path tool in GIMP to create all the straight lines, filling in everything with the bucket tool, and using the text tool and a simplistic sans-serif font.

I debated adding a certain rock, or perhaps some vines, but since it’s minimalist, I think this is perfect as it is.